Peer Review Highly Sensitive To Poor Refereeing

$RANDOMLUSER writes "A new study described at Physicsworld.com claims that a small percentage of shoddy or self-interested referees can have a drastic effect on published article quality. The research shows that article quality can drop as much as one standard deviation when just 10% of referees do not behave 'correctly.' At high levels of self-serving or random behavior, 'the peer-review system will not perform much better than by accepting papers by throwing (an unbiased) coin.' The model also includes calculations for 'friendship networks' (nepotism) between authors and reviewers. The original paper, by a pair of complex systems researchers, is available at arXiv.org. No word on when we can expect it to be peer reviewed."

Comments

just like /.?

[grub]

Peer Review Highly Sensitive To Poor Refereeing

Much like /.'s moderation system. No Citation Needed for this one.

Will this change anything?

[iONiUM]

Since the scientific community is so very obsessed with peer review, will this study actually modify the standard procedure?

Of course, all I can think of is: gee, I wonder if this has had any impact on all the climate change studies that are constantly contradicting each other...

Re:Will this change anything?

[mcgrew]

I had to google to find out what an "aforism" was, and found that there is no such thing. Google asked "Did you mean: aphorism?"

Ok, now I know what an aforism is. It's an aphorism that's misspelled so badly that I couldn't figure out WTF you were talking about. Have you ever even seen the word "aphorism" in print before?

Some of us don't move our lips when we read, nor sound out words, so when you do that you lose us completely. Some of us, when we read, don't even see the words; we see only what the words convey, like the guy in The Matrix who said "I don't even see the code any more. I just see blondes, brunettes, redheads..."

Re:Will this change anything?

[mcgrew]

No, I'm an annoyed hyperlex.

Re:The climate skeptics will have a field day

[sycodon]

And here we have one, although he has a new and novel objection to nuclear power. But nonetheless, with the specter of Global Warming looming over us all, heralding the end of life as we know it, he STILL doesn't want to go nuclear.

Yes, people should stop having babies (Didn't that gunman at the Discover Channel studios want that too?) because 1) you all are nothing but horny teenagers, and 2) pretty much your mental status is questionable (undoubtedly because you don't think the way he does.)

So throw out your kids toys and just feed your pets table scraps because we need these companies to build lots of reactors.